Social media crisis management

I've been recently thinking about my post on crisis management from the 19th of February and the role play crisis management exercise we had in class on February, 17th.

I came to the conclusion that it is a hard job to foresee a crisis, to know where it may come from and who can be involved in it and to plan ahead how to deal with it. However it is what a PR practitioner should be striving for.

There are hundreds of tips and instructions available on how to handle a crisis, an uncountable number of books and articles, though none of them can predict the situation you can face. On the one hand, as soon as these written pieces are released they are already out of date and, on the other hand, crisis one can get into is always unique in its details. Still all of such reading sources are important and very useful, but they can only help a general understanding of what a crisis is and how to manage it. Other issues are a matter of personal, situational and individual means of crisis management in real life.

Present time sees a dramatic rise of social media, what can affect any business reputation, equally. Therefore every organization must include in its crisis management plans the impact of social media and its influencers and the steps to be taken to deal with the crisis online. The
New Media Age magazine has published on the 25ht of March this year an article - Nestle's example of how to damage your reputation through wrong actions on the Net.

Right after this article I found a piece by Mike Johansson on crisis management in the "Twitter Age". It is worth reading if you care about you reputation and if you are present in any social networks on the Web.

Finally, it is definetely a must to respect your customers in any community in any place in the world through all possible means and tools, to be transparent and keep your followers up-to-date with all relevant information presented in an appropriate tone of voice.